


Chills

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Courfeyrac watches telenovelas, Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, h/c but with realistic levels of c ie not that much, so basically h
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't that he had never seen their Fearless Leader (as he called him only half jokingly) show weakness before.  He'd been there from the beginning, had seen it all: Drunken nights in which giddy elation transformed into crippling doubt, sober moments late at night when the darkness and quiet called out deeper honestly than could live in the daytime.  And he'd seen Enjolras hung over (perhaps a tenth as many times as Enjolras had seen him in the same state); sunburnt and on rare occasions gloriously black-eyed after political rallies; and (most frequently of all) dead on his feet from too many late nights studying and planning—and dreaming, which came to the same thing for Enjolras, though he didn't even realize it.  After all this time, Courfeyrac had no illusions of his friend being a marble god, immune to human weaknesses.</p><p>But none of that had been quite like this.  And Courfeyrac was scared.</p><p>* * * </p><p>Enjolras is sick and Courfeyrac takes him to the emergency room.  That's it, that's the fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chills

It was the idiot's own fault, of course—he'd been sick for days, pushing past it, pretending that illness wasn't real or didn't apply to him. He _deserved_ to get sick, with the way he treated his body, allowing it to sleep for a few hours at a time as if it were an annoying little dog that he could satisfy with table scraps and otherwise ignore. And usually Courfeyrac felt a little bit of vicious satisfaction when it finally happened, even though it meant Enjolras's irritability would be cranked up to a fever (ha ha, fever) pitch, filling the apartment with crackly tension along with the sound of hacking and nose blowing and driving Combeferre out to study in peace in the library until the storm passed.

It hadn't surprised anyone when Enjolras had started coughing and sniffling around the beginning of the last week before finals, nor did surprise any of them when he stubbornly pretended he wasn't sick, staying up later, if anything. Combeferre sighed and dug out his really big backpack (the one that would hold a full day's worth of study materials plus non-crumb-producing foods that could be eaten surreptitiously at a study carrel); Courfeyrac quietly picked up an extra box of tissues on his next grocery run. Nobody tried to convince Enjolras to actually accept that he was a body of flesh, with flesh's limitations, and might want to skip studying and go to bed early for once. Heaven forbid suggesting skipping class: Even flushed, hacking Enjolras with pockets stuffed with tissues in various states of use—the way he staggered out of the apartment Thursday morning—was an irrational creature not to be defied lightly.

Later, Courfeyrac would hate himself for not being more assertive about it, for not stepping up and hiding Enjolras's keys or resetting his alarm clock (or even straight-up telling him to stop being an idiot and take care of himself). But that was the way life was, wasn't it? You fell into a routine and everything seemed fine and you had no idea—not until the moment it was too late and everything had already gone to hell.

That moment had not yet arrived on Friday morning, when Courfeyrac was interrupted in the middle of his ritual Friday-morning bowl of Lucky Charms and _Heridas de Amor_ (he watched it for the Spanish practice, dammit—and anyway he was an adult and didn't have to justify his choices to anyone) by Enjolras staggering into the apartment and dropping his bag by his desk. When he had recovered from his slack-jawed amazement—Enjolras bringing himself home in the middle of the day, on nobody's orders!--Courfeyrac muted the TV and asked what his roommate was doing home, just to hear it from his own mouth.

“I feel like shit,” Enjolras muttered. “And today was bio lab.”

Courfeyrac thought about twisting the knife a little bit more--“But Enjolras, the labs make up 50% of your grade in that class! Can you afford to just skip one?” (You could. Courfeyrac had skipped three when he took the class the year before.)--but his friend really did look miserable, so he went for mercy. “Good call--you can't get away with sitting in the back and pretend to be listening in a lab. You wouldn't get anything out of it, and there'd be no point. Want to join?” He scooted over so he wasn't sprawling over quite the entire couch and offered the remote like a generous monarch. “You can even pick the channel, if you're sure you don't want to find out what Miranda's letter to Caesar said.”

Enjolras just shook his head. “Mm. Going to lie down for a bit.”

“Okay. Let me know if you need anything.”

Enjolras disappeared into his room and Courfeyrac unmuted the TV, turning the volume down to just-audible so his roommate could sleep. He didn't hear anything else from Enjolras for the rest of the episode, and then he had to run out as soon as the final cliffhanger twist happened to get to class (10:55 to 11:10 was a perfectly reasonable length of time to get onto campus and up to the fourth floor of the math/science building—as long as unreasonable people didn't insist on walking three abreast and at the speed of 0.5 mph on campus sidewalks).

After Calc, it was Microeconomics, and then work for the rest of the afternoon. Working until eight on Friday evenings was kind of a drag, but the student union was always busy and full of life on Friday nights, which made it better, and to be honest, he needed the money. Besides, eight wasn't _that_ late; there were still plenty of good going-out hours left in the night at that point, even on the nights when he had spilled buffalo sauce all the way down his front and had to go home and shower and change first. Which, in point of fact, he _had_ , and so he did.

He was just getting out of the shower—running across the apartment in a pair of hand towels because he had forgotten to bring clean clothes or an actual real towel to the bathroom with him—when Enjolras stumbled out of his room looking like a corpse, wraped in the shroud of an oversized sweatshirt with the hood up over his head. He didn't seem to notice Courfeyrac's extreme state of undress (he hardly seemed to see him at all), and Courfeyrac gratefully scampered to his room to throw on a T-shirt and pajama pants. When he came back out into the living room, Enjolras was slumped at the table, his head resting on his hand, a thermometer gripped between his lips.

“You look kind of awful,” Courfeyrac told the back of his friend's head. It was almost automatic to him to talk this way, but when Enjolras turned bleary eyes toward him the joke kind of died on the doorstep of his mouth. Enjolras looked—of course not really, nothing really _bad_ ever happened to his friends, this was just a cold and it would be gone and forgotten by tomorrow, but he _looked—_ more than kind of awful. He looked bad, scarily bad.

The thermometer beeped. “Well?” Courfeyrac asked, when Enjolras did not announce the number triumphantly, as Courfeyrac would have (whether low or high—either one could be considered an accomplishment).

“A hundred and four.”

That was a bad number, Courfeyrac knew dimly, but it was the timbre of Enjolras's voice, weak under the scratchiness, that really sent a cold wave through his insides. “That's . . . not good,” he said slowly. “That . . . Enjolras, I think you're supposed to call a doctor when you have a fever that high.”

Enjolras shook his head. “Don't be stupid. I'm not going to call a doctor for a cold.”

“Well, then call Joly, he doesn't count as--”

He pushed himself up from the table. “No. Not going to happen.”

Courfeyrac hesitated, but decided to turn his efforts in a more productive direction. “Fine. But you have to take medicine at least. And water. And dinner—did you eat anything tonight?”

“I had . . . I had some crackers, I guess.”

“When?”

“I don't know, maybe around four?”

“Enjolras, it's nine o'clock at night!—you can't eat nothing but crackers all day. And you wonder why you're sick! I'll heat up some soup or something.” He went into the kitchen, got the Ibuprofen out of the drawer where he kept it for easy hangover doctoring, and tossed it out to Enjolras. “Here—take two of those. I'll get you some water.”

When he returned with the water, Enjolras was still fumbling with the child-proof cap. Courfeyrac wordlessly took the bottle from his shaking hands, popped it open, and handed him the pills. Beneath the flush of the fever, Enjolras turned even redder.

“It's just that I'm cold,” he muttered. “It's freezing in here.”

Courfeyrac, comfortable in bare feet and short sleeves, had his doubts, but he just said, “Hot soup, then.”

Enjolras mumbled something indistinct and shuffled over to the couch, curling up under the hideous afghan that had come from Combeferre's aunt and which Courfeyrac refused to let them put away in storage. His coughing shook the big orange and chartreuse flowers, making them look even more like the bad trip Courfeyrac had always suspected was their inspiration.

They didn't have any canned soup, it turned out, so Courfeyrac made toast and tea, those being the only “illness foods” he could think of. (Though he sort of thought they were supposed to be for upset stomach more for colds. What did you make for a cold if you didn't have chicken soup?) He brought it back to the couch, along with the burger he'd brought back from work, and turned on the TV.

“Movie or TV show?”

Enjolras shrugged, pushing the triangles of toast around on the plate so they lined up more correctly. “Anything that doesn't require thinking.”

“Inception, then.” Enjolras should have glared at him for that. He didn't.

He didn't really respond at all, but Courfeyrac pressed on ahead as if he'd given him his best you-mindless-capitalist-sheep glare. “No really, it makes equally as much sense if you think about it or if you don't.” But he flipped through the channels instead until he found a sitcom, an old rerun of a _Friends_ episode where the only confusion was Ross and Rachel's romantic status at this point in the show (you could make a pretty good guess by extrapolating from Rachel's current hairstyle)--and Enjolras wouldn't mind that ambiguity since he'd think their romantic status irrelevant anyway. Enjolras hated sitcoms, but he wasn't expressing much of an opinion tonight, and Courfeyrac was finding himself craving the cheery, uncomplicated, laugh-tracked life that was the basis of all those shows.

It was probably a good thing Courfeyrac hadn't put a lot of effort into making soup from scratch (or going out and getting some), because Enjolras only ate most of one of the toast triangles. Well, he'd eaten _something_ at least, Courfeyrac told himself, and concentrated on nagging about fluids— _Did you finish your tea? No, don't go to dump it out, I'll heat it up for you again. Drink your water, too. Yes, I_ am _your mother, you've found me out, I've been in disguise all these years. Just drink your damn water, you ridiculous child._ Enjolras was still shivering, in spite of the tea and the hoodie and the afghan. Courfeyrac brought out another blanket.

In between watching Enjolras out of the corner of his eye, waiting for the shivering to stop already, he texted Combeferre. _So . . . fevers. How high is doctor-going bad? made him take meds and drink fluids, anything else i should do?_ There was no response and Courfeyrac remembered that Combeferre usually turned his phone off in the library like the idiotically responsible student he was. He considered texting Joly, but he knew that would just get him an urgent phone call in return, and Enjolras had said not to call anybody. So he kept pretending to watch the show, going back and forth between checking his phone and trying not to stare at Enjolras too creepily.

After Enjolras had drunk a glass and a half of water and most of the mug of tea, Courfeyrac stopped badgering, and before long he had fallen asleep. Courfeyrac turned the TV down to the faintest murmur, just so the apartment wouldn't feel like a crypt, and made a few gestures in the straightening-up direction (carry half-eaten toast into kitchen, toss discarded gym socks into bedroom of most likely offender, put mystery half-bottle of V-8 back in the fridge even though it's probably been out longer than it should have); then he settled back onto the couch beside Enjolras, pulled a textbook out of his backpack, and started working on his reading for Monday.

He woke up with a stiff neck, with the corner of the book poking painfully between two ribs and pages 249 through 270 folded back and crushed underneath him. He extricated the textbook from beneath his torso, dumped it on the floor, and rolled his neck to get the cricks out. He checked his phone. Quarter to two. And Combeferre was still at the library? He must have been, he hadn't answered his text—and as ridiculous as he was about dutifully turning the phone off in places that were meant to be quiet, he _was_ equally good about turning it on again and checking for messages when he left those places. There was also the fact that Courfeyrac had been sleeping here on the living room couch and hadn't awakened to find a blanket over him; Combeferre had definitely not come home while he'd been asleep. Thinking of Combeferre's mothering (although really the blanket thing was about as maternal as Combeferre got), Courfeyrac reached over Enjolras's hunched shoulders to check his forehead.

He'd never felt skin so hot.

He got up from the couch. Checked again. Felt Enjolras's cheeks. Compared his own forehead with Enjolras's. Definitely warm. Definitely much warmer than it should be.

Courfeyrac glanced guiltily at the pile of blankets heaped up over his roommate's body. Was this his fault? But he'd been so cold; Courfeyrac had just been trying to help; why wasn't Combeferre here, he was the one who knew what to do with this kind of stuff!

The first thing to do, before freaking out, he reminded himself belatedly, was to use an actual thermometer and find out whether the fever was just high or Really High. He got the thermometer from the table and crouched down next to Enjolras, shaking his shoulder gently.

“Hey, I'm really sorry,” he murmured. “I know you're tired and you feel like crap, but I need you to wake up. I need to take your temperature, 'cause I'm not sure but I think it might be really high, and we really need to find out so we can do something about it.”

Enjolras made a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan, but he opened his eyes and pushed himself up on one elbow. “Wha—what time is it?”

“It's the middle of the night, Enj, I'm sorry. It's probably nothing and you can go right back to sleep if it is, I promise. Just can you take your temperature please?”

He opened his mouth obediently and clamped down on the thermometer. Courfeyrac was alarmed to see that his hands were still shaking.

“Are you still cold?” Enjolras nodded over the thermometer. “Shit,” Courfeyrac muttered. “I could bring you another blanket . . . but I don't know if that's a good idea. I forgot about this, but I think maybe you're not supposed to get under a lot of blankets if you have a fever—it just makes your body hotter. If it's high, I don't know, maybe it would be better to take some of the blankets off, if you can stand it.”

The thermometer beeped and Enjolras handed it over to Courfeyrac without looking at the numbers. Courfeyrac read it. And there it was—the moment when you realized you let things go on as they were for too long and now it's too late.

“A hundred and six point three—Enjolras, this is _not_ okay! You have to go to the doctor!” He jumped up, but Enjolras caught his arm.

“No,” he muttered. “No, I'm—I don't want to. I don't . . . you know how I feel about hospitals.”

“But a hundred and six, I _know_ that's bad.”

“Maybe it's because of what you said . . . because of the blankets.” He fumbled with them, trying to push them away with shaky hands. “I'll take them off . . . maybe . . . maybe it goes down.”

Courfeyrac bit his lip. “Okay,” he said finally. “Fifteen minutes. And take some more Ibuprofen. We'll see if it makes a difference. If not . . .”

It was a very long fifteen minutes. He'd thought Enjolras had been fuzzy and out of it because he'd just woken up, but he didn't get any clearer as time went on. He was very quiet, eyelids drooping ( _just sleepy_ , Courfeyrac told himself; _you'd be sleepy too if someone woke you in the middle of the night_ ), answering Courfeyrac's questions with a handful of words and then drifting off into silence again. And he was obviously so miserable. Without the blankets, his whole body shook with chills in between fits of coughing; the clattering of his teeth was audible even over the faintly playing late-night infomercials that had taken over sometime while they'd slept.

At the end of the fifteen minutes, Courfeyrac held out the thermometer, and Enjolras took it without a word, setting it grimly between his lips. They waited. It beeped.

“A hundred and six point four,” Courfeyrac read, and Enjolras slumped in resignation. “We're going to the hospital.”

“Okay.” It was almost a whisper.

Maybe he didn't have the energy to fight Courfeyrac on it, or maybe he finally felt bad enough that he realized he really did need to get help; either way, Enjolras didn't put up any further protests. He accepted Courfeyrac's help getting into his coat, and either he didn't notice that Courfeyrac had given him his Crocs or he felt so terrible that he didn't even care. (Later, Courfeyrac found himself hoping, he would be able to tease him for wearing the Crocs. _Please._ ) While Courfeyrac hastily pulled on shoes and a sweatshirt and—remembering about fall and night and what they did to the temperature outside—a jacket on top of that, Enjolras laid his head down on the arm of the couch and waited, eyes closed, until Courfeyrac touched him on the shoulder and said “Okay, let's go.”

“Wha—oh.” He got up slowly and shuffled toward the door. Courfeyrac, hovering behind him, didn't know whether to take his arm or let him walk by himself; he knew Enjolras valued his independence above all else (except, perhaps, the independence of the working class as a whole), and he knew Enjolras, unlike himself, didn't really like to be touched. But it frightened him how unsteady his friend's steps were. When Enjolras tripped over nothing in the middle of the lobby, Courfeyrac took him by the arm. Enjolras didn't pull away.

The hospital was ten minutes away, but it felt like an hour. Courfeyrac turned the heat up as high as his rusty old Civic could manage, but Enjolras couldn't stop shivering. He sat curled up in the passenger seat, his knees clutched against his chest as if for warmth. Courfeyrac tried to talk to him, to keep him from drifting off, but his responses were faint and confused, and in the end Courfeyrac just talked by himself, aware that he was babbling but unable to stop, feeling like he had to keep the car filled up with noise (to fend off what?).

Finally, the pulled in to the hospital lot and Courfeyrac parked by the emergency room entrance. “We're here.” Enjolras didn't respond. “Enjolras. _Enjolras!_ ”

“Hm?” He stirred listlessly.

“We're here.” Courfeyrac was already out of the car and closing the door.

“Where?” The door slammed on the question and Courfeyrac hurried around to the other side.

“The hospital. Come on!” This time he didn't give Enjolras the chance to prove how unsteady he was on his feet, but pulled him up and wedged himself in under one arm, wrapping his own arm around his friend's back. He kicked the car door closed behind them ( _Oh shit, did I leave the keys? Well, if I did, it's too late now.)_ and guided Enjolras toward the emergency room door.

Enjolras glanced up at the building and shuddered. “You okay?” Courfeyrac asked him.

“I hate hospitals,” Enjolras moaned. Ordinarily the complaint might have sounded grumpy or sullen, but at two o'clock in the morning, in a voice barely above a whisper, it just sounded . . . small. Scared.

“I know. It sucks—but you really need to see a doctor.” Courfeyrac tightened his arm around Enjolras's back. “It'll be okay. We'll leave the second they say you can, okay?”

But he had his doubts when they walked into the emergency room and were met with blood—actual blood—smeared across the floor. The harried-looking nurse working the desk made a half-hearted attempt to call out a warning, but dropped it as soon as it was apparent Courfeyrac had seen it.

“Sorry,” she said when they reached the desk. “It's been a crazy night. You're here for him?”

Courfeyrac nodded. “He has a fever—a hundred and six. Point something. That's really high, isn't it?”

The nurse handed Courfeyrac a clipboard. “Definitely—you were right to come in. And someone will help you just as soon as we can. But we just had a guy walk in here with his hand half cut off, and before that there was a big car accident from up at the turnpike interchange, and before _that—_ well, basically what I'm saying is, you're probably going to have to wait a little while, if it's just a fever. If you can just fill out this paperwork, we'll take you in triage in just a couple of minutes.”

The wait for triage wasn't long—a tall black nurse called Enjolras back about thirty seconds after Courfeyrac had finished with the single sheet of paperwork. As he waited in the lobby, his phone chimed, and a text from Combeferre popped up.

_Sorry. Just left the library. In general, you call a doctor for a fever 103 or above. Everyone okay? I'll be home soon._

He sent back: _We're not there, Enjolras is worse and we're at the ER. But a doctor, okay a nurse but still, is looking at him now so thats good._ Then, as Combeferre's text had a chance to sink in, he followed up with: _Shit, 103, really? It was 104 this evening but I didn't make him go in, now it's 106, oh shit combeferre I fucked this up._

_Not your fault you didn't know. Should I come in?_

Courfeyrac hesitated. He _wanted_ Combeferre there—god, how he wanted him there! Combeferre always knew what do to next. Combeferre wouldn't be scared shitless by the way Enjolras's eye's were so dull and confused. But there was nothing really for him to do, nothing that the ER doctors wouldn't already be doing. It wasn't fair to ask Combeferre to stay up all night just because Courfeyrac couldn't handle his friend being sick. _No, I guess we're okay, you should get some sleep. No reason for us both to stay up all night. I'll text you when we find something out._

Just then, the nurse poked her head out of the triage room and beckoned Courfeyrac over. She asked him about the evening, how high Enjolras's fever had been at different points, what meds he had taken and when and how many; apparently Enjolras's memory of the last few hours was too fuzzy to base medical action on ( _oh shit,_ Courfeyrac thought, and then tried to convince himself it wasn't as bad as it sounded). Then Enjolras was handed back over to him with a blanket and the same general assurances the nurse at the front desk had given—we'll have a doctor examine him as soon as we can, but it'll be a while, maybe two or three hours; in here we never really know how things are going to go; please wait patiently and we will get to you as soon as possible.

Back in the waiting room, Courfeyrac steered Enjolras toward a set of chairs in the back corner, as quiet and out of the way as you could get in a room full of sick, anxious people. Enjolras collapsed into the chair and rested his face in his hands. Courfeyrac adjusted the blanket around his shoulders and then—they waited.

Even at three in the morning, the emergency room was full of people. A kid in the corner was coughing continuously, his mother fighting arguing with the nurse in broken English about how soon he would be seen. Across from Courfeyrac and Enjolras sat an old couple; she was resting her head on his shoulder, eyes closed, their hands entwined. Both looked old and pale and worn out, and Courfeyrac wasn't sure which of them was the sick one.

“Let's just go home,” Enjolras muttered through his fingers, a catch in his voice. “We'll be here for hours and what are they going to do, anyway? There's no point in sitting here with all these sick people and . . .” He was interrupted by a coughing fit.

“Hey,” Courfeyrac said, rubbing his shoulder, “it'll be okay. The doctor will be with you soon.”

Enjolras finally managed to stop coughing. “No,” he said, his voice shaky. “I just want to go home. Please, Courf--” He brushed a hand over his eyes. (Surely the tears were just brought on by the coughing? Courfeyrac had never seen Enjolras cry, not really.)

“We can't leave; you need to see a doctor. I'm sorry, I know you don't like hospitals.” He felt so helpless. “Just hang on, maybe try to get some rest. You want to lie down? We've got three chairs to ourselves; I'll be your pillow.”

At Courfeyrac's urging, Enjolras dropped over onto his side, laying his head on Courfeyrac's legs and curling up so his body and legs fit on the other two chairs. Courfeyrac spread the blanket out over him—he was still shaking with chills—and he closed his eyes.

Courfeyrac found himself looking around the waiting room, watching the other people who were waiting. Of course, they were all sick people—not the kind of people-watching Courfeyrac really liked—but looking at a sick stranger was better than looking at Enjolras, seeing the unnatural flush of his face, the way his hands shook where they grasped the edge of the blanket, the tension around his lips that spoke of pain. And even without looking, he could hear the harsh, wet coughs, feel how they convulsed Enjolras's body. He found himself longing for Combeferre again, for someone who would tell him it would all be okay, and make him believe it. Because seeing Enjolras—usually the strong one, more independent than even Combeferre, unstoppable and unchangeable—like this, curled up and shivering on a row of waiting room chairs, was really doing a number on Courfeyrac.

It wasn't that he had never seen their Fearless Leader (as he called him only half jokingly) show weakness before. He'd been there from the beginning, had seen it all: Drunken nights in which giddy elation transformed into crippling doubt, sober moments late at night when the darkness and quiet called out deeper honestly than could live in the daytime. And he'd seen Enjolras hung over (perhaps a tenth as many times as Enjolras had seen him in the same state); sunburnt and on rare occasions gloriously black-eyed after political rallies; and (most frequently of all) dead on his feet from too many late nights studying and planning—and dreaming, which came to the same thing for Enjolras, though he didn't even realize it. After all this time, Courfeyrac had no illusions of his friend being a marble god, immune to human weaknesses.

But none of that had been quite like this. And Courfeyrac was scared.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so that's an abrupt ending, sorry. I feel bad dropping it in the middle of everything but until I feel inspired to add to it, this is all I've got. It doesn't really have a point so I suppose it doesn't really require resolution. I just wanted to play with some college AU headcanons and also I had read a really compelling sick Enjolras prompt so yeah.


End file.
